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Friday, 19 December 2014

Solely on its own terms

“It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” or “non-objective” art-and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape-not its picture-is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch, 1939. Partisan review p. 36.